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Qualcomm unveils Centriq 2400 series 10nm server chip

Firm fires shot across Intel's bows

Qualcomm has launched the 'world's first' 10nm server processor in a move that throws down the gauntlet to rival Intel.

The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 series, the first in the Centriq product family that Qualcomm has been working on for four years, has up to 48 ARMv8-compliant cores targeting compute-intensive data centre applications that require power efficiency and is built on the 10nm FinFET manufacturing processor.

"The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 series processors will drive high performance, power-efficient ARM-based servers from concept to reality," said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies.

"Qualcomm requires the leading edge of integrated circuit technology to deliver high performance at low power for the newest premium smartphones.

"We are first in 10nm IC technology for mobile, and leveraging our expertise in ARM processors and system on chip design, we are the first with our Qualcomm Centriq family of server processors to bring the leading edge to the data centre."

At a launch event, Qualcomm demonstrated Apache Spark and Hadoop on Linux and Java running on a Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor.

The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor series is now sampling to key prospective customers and is expected to be commercially available in the second half of 2017.

This processor, expected to debut inside next year's Samsung Galaxy S8, is said to offer a 30 per cent increase in area efficiency yielding 27 per cent better performance compared to Qualcomm's 14nm Snapdragon 821 chip, along with 40 per cent lower power consumption.

Using 10nm FinFET, the Snapdragon 835 processor will also have a smaller chip footprint, giving OEMs more usable space inside upcoming products to support larger batteries or slimmer designs.